They never listened to us

For the 49 years since Roe v. Wade, the pro-life movement has been clear in its objectives and increasingly refined in its arguments. As its members rebutted criticisms, created common ground between those who viewed Roe merely as a legal issue and those who viewed it as a human rights issue, and advanced in politics, much of the left dismissed the movement’s abilities and ignored its arguments. It has all been to the left’s detriment.

I began my distinctly political journey in college. Growing up in Dubai, I found my connection to American life in the newspaper and in political debates my history teacher made me read. But in college, I joined the College Republicans and began making friends inside the pro-life cause. I learned and loved the intellectually consistent arguments.

In my sophomore year, I took a constitutional law class. Even the liberal professor who taught the class could see the flawed reasoning in Roe and compared it to Prohibition—a democratic effort that successfully convinced Americans to amend the Constitution for a moral cause that was then undone by democratic effort. That was the first and last time I heard a liberal make that comparison until David Frum made it this past week in The Atlantic.

Frum argues that, like with Prohibition, abortion is now decided by a patchwork of state laws. “Pro-life politics in the United States used to be mostly posturing and positioning, the taking of extreme rhetorical positions at no real-world cost,” he writes. “Republicans in red states could enact bills that burdened women who sought abortions, knowing that many voters shrugged off these statutes and counted on the courts to protect women’s rights. Now the highest court has abdicated its protective role, and those voters will have to either submit to their legislature’s burdens or replace the legislators.”

Exactly. Given the ups and downs of politics, it’s likely that the pro-life movement will not be successful everywhere. As Frum notes and as I have long written, we will soon see a lot of pro-life politicians who never really were pro-life. They knew they could claim to be and that the Supreme Court would protect them from the consequences of their professed beliefs. Now, with Dobbs, the court will at least let the argument take place.

Frum made his argument as if it was new. But Prohibition has been an example the pro-life movement has used for 49 years. Even my liberal college professor in the 1990s knew that. Prohibition worked through the constitutional processes, while abortion used seven life-tenured oligarchs to short-circuit democratic debate. The pro-life movement could not change the rules democratically except by changing the court.

It has done just that. The pro-life movement became the largest, most effective movement for human rights since the civil rights era. Activists provided intellectual arguments that morphed into legal arguments. The legal arguments were embraced by groups of lawyers while the intellectual arguments were embraced by opinion leaders. The hearts and minds of voters were changed. The voters replaced pro-abortion politicians with pro-lifers. Those pro-lifers picked judges who embraced the legal arguments. Almost 50 years later, under the rules of American politics and democratic life, a central goal of the pro-life movement won.

Now we are in a post-Roe era where the left is parroting our arguments as if they are new to us. Frum uses Prohibition. A litany of Democrat politicians and progressive celebrities demand pro-lifers support laws forcing fathers to pay child support to pregnant women. Gladly! They demand we strengthen the tax code for moms. Gladly!

In throwing these arguments at us, it is clear they never heard us. The pro-life movement worked democratically, often in poor and middle-class neighborhoods and through churches. We learned to speak to people who did not look like us. We learned to accommodate those who had disagreements but agreed Roe was terrible law. Through it all, the left talked only to itself. The left-leaning cultural elite that controls the media, the academy, and cultural institutions never had to hear us because they thought we were a fringe group who did not matter and whose cause was doomed.

We have won the fight to end Roe and find ourselves with a multicultural pro-life movement transcending all demographics. The pro-abortion movement is represented by a mostly upper-income secular white cohort of talking heads on television, shocked we have answers to their questions because they ignored us until they could not. Now, we have an intellectual advantage with which we can advance our cause. We understand them and can make their arguments for them in good faith. But they do not understand us and cannot make our arguments in good faith. Therefore, the debate ahead will be hard for them. They never had to do the intellectual legwork because they had the Supreme Court—which they have now lost.

With Dobbs, now we get to democracy.